On kissing fish and finding good stuff to watch on TV.

In those moments on the radio when they give you a news headlines recap before the next programme starts, at 6.00pm, 7.00pm and 8.00pm yesterday evening, they included an item about a man who had accidentally swallowed a live fish, gone into cardiac arrest and had his life saved by paramedics. Sensible newspapers like the Guardian carried reports of it.

This is all very good for telling is how great the paramedics are but does it really rate up there alongside news of Trump being ridiculous about Iran and Brexit negotiations coming to a standstill? It's not even when the government is on holiday, for goodness sake! And the bloke in question only swallowed the fish because he was giving it a kiss before throwing it back. I know this because they interviewed him on the PM programme on Radio 4. Who goes round kissing fish? Fishermen, obviously! Good grief!

When you think of demonstrations and other events that go on around the world and do not get reported, this sort of thing makes you wonder what goes on in the minds of programme compilers. Someone actively decided to include this item in the news. Pretty soon the angler, or perhaps the fish, will be appearing on chat shows and Question Time and Have I got News for You? They might even end up leading the country!

On the other hand, maybe somebody simply decided that we needed some good news stories to compensate for all the doom and gloom: Brexit, threats of war, "I too was abused", and environmental issues. So it goes!

Usually towards the end of the evening we indulge in a little escapism by watching some television. Finding less and less stuff directly transmitted that interests us we have been catching up on a variety of series on Netflix. Yesterday evening, having recently finished off House of Cards, we were at a bit of a loss and so trawled through stuff we have recorded onto the television's digibox.

We settled for a programme about Tom Petty; made around ten years ago, it was celebrating thirty years of The Heartbreakers. We had forgotten how long the programme was and found ourselves sitting up way past our bedtime - well, way past my bedtime anyway. I had to have a lie-in this morning!

It was a fascinating programme, full of great music and full of insight into the exploitation rife in the music business and the struggles artists had to own the rights to their own compositions. As Tom Petty said, when he naively gave the record company "publishing rights" he thought it meant printing songbooks, not that he was letting them take his songs away from him. He fought and got them back even though he ended up fighting against not just one record company but practically the whole record industry. Amazing stuff!

The Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers concert I went to in the summer was part of the fortieth anniversary tour. How amazing that three musicians who became friends at the end of the 1960s, Tom Petty, Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell, could continue playing together for so long. Other members of the band had come and gone but the core remained and always it seemed like a family. How many manufactured bands and winners of television reality shows will last so long?

Benmont Tench, asked how long he thought they could continue, said that so long as the other two wanted to be in the band he was ready to continue. He got ten more years out of it and then fate stepped in. I consider myself fortunate to have been there in Hyde Park in the summer!